Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Dante Season at Oxford (2021)

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“Oxford will be alive with opportunities to celebrate Dante in 2021 — exactly 700 years since the great poet’s death.

“Dante in Oxford 2021 will explore the work and its many and rich afterlives, by exploring new forms of public engagement with research, with artistic practice, and with political and cultural history. We will draw on the strength of Oxford’s research community to curate a wide-reaching cultural festival with a range of public events, including live in-person and online programming.

“We are collaborating with important partners across and beyond the university, including the Oxford Dante Society, the Ashmolean Museum, and other national and international partners. Bringing together scholars and translators, international artists, dancers, theatre-makers, and musicians, community groups, and schools, our ambition is both to disseminate and showcase Oxford’s world-leading research, and to experiment with new forms of critically informed public engagement – all in celebration of Dante’s life and the many and complex contexts in which his work lives on, through both research and reinvention in contemporary cultures across the world.” [. . .]    —TORCH (retrieved February 7, 2022)

The complete Dante Season program can be found here.

Relatedly, find other Dante in Oxford 2021 events and posts here.

Dante: A Life, Alessandro Barbero (2021)

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dante_a_life_barbero_cover“So the biographer must ultimately choose: Either hew to the evidence and ferret out whatever rare nugget about Dante’s life remains uncovered, or surrender to the genius of the work he called his Comedìa and try to broker a fragile peace between literary interpretation and life writing.

“In a new biography timed (in its original Italian publication) to the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death in 1321 and translated fluidly by Allan Cameron, the Italian historian and novelist Alessandro Barbero chooses the first option. His vita, or life, of Dante, revisits some of the perennial riddles in Dante studies: Did the poet make it to Paris during his exile? (Barbero believes yes, contrary to most.) What was Dante’s socioeconomic class? (In Barbero’s view, higher than many think.) While still in Florence before his exile, did Dante conceive the project that would later become his Comedy? (Perhaps so, Barbero argues, once again against the grain.)

“We can be grateful to Barbero for this richly informative biography of a man who can seem so reticent and aloof that at times it feels as if he’s hiding behind the 14,233 verses of “The Divine Comedy” rather than revealing himself. But for those who are looking to learn more about the Dante in us, a biography has to do more than deliver the plausible facts. And so the quest for a vita of Dante in English will likely lead us right back to where Emerson suggested: the poetry from Dante’s own hand.” [. . .]    — Joseph Luzzi, The New York Times, January 4, 2022 (retrieved January 17, 2022)

See our other post relating to Barbero and the 700th Anniversary here.

Why Does Everyone Love Dante? Article, Jason M. Baxter (2021)

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baxter_dante_article_screenshot“No other artist has aged as well as Dante Alighieri. He has never really gone out of fashion, except perhaps during the Enlightenment. Just after his death, his Divine Comedy was the subject of heavy-duty theological commentaries in Latin, a level of study generally reserved for works of sacred theology. A century later, during the Renaissance, ambitious designers, whose heads were full of cartography and perspective and new worlds, ambitiously mapped out Dante’s view of the afterlife, as if it were a newly discovered continent (see, for example, Botticelli’s famous map of hell).

“Now, during the 700th anniversary year of Dante’s death, Pope Francis has written an apostolic letter in his honor, calling him a ‘prophet of hope’ and a ‘witness to the innate yearning for the infinite present in the human heart.’

“In short, nothing makes you crave mercy, thirst for it with a dry mouth, quite like Dante’s avant-garde, modernist poem of pain and human failure. And I think this is what has motivated the pope to turn literary critic! At the heart of Dante’s poem is a fragmented vision. But paradoxically, it was precisely because Dante’s human plans failed him that he, purged of mere earthly longing, could emerge as the poet of hope and desire and mercy.” [. . .]    –Jason M. Baxter, America, the Jesuit Review, August 20, 2021 (retrieved January 12, 2022)

Read the full text of Baxter’s article here.

Also, check out our post on Baxter’s book about the Divine Comedy here.

“Stai fermo un girone: Un gioco per scoprire Dante e il suo mondo”

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“‘Stai fermo un girone’ è un gioco concepito sul modello del tradizionale ‘gioco dell’oca,’ dedicato all’Inferno di Dante Alighieri e alle discipline della ricerca umanistica coinvolte nello studio del Medioevo.

“Per avanzare e vincere non occorrono soltanto conoscenze sui canti, i personaggi e i temi infernali, ma ci si dovrà anche confrontare con diversi metodi di indagine applicati ai testi negli studi universitari: questa, anzi, sarà la porta d’accesso per guardare all’opera dantesca sullo sfondo dell’intero Medioevo, con la sua storia, le sue idee, la sua cultura, i problemi che si è posto e le risposte che ha provato a dare. Il gioco potrà servire a stimolare e consolidare l’apprendimento in studenti delle superiori che incontrino per la prima volta i versi danteschi, o essere occasione per tutti gli appassionati per rivivere e ricordare – in maniera più disimpegnata – letture del passato. Grazie ai suoi tre livelli di difficoltà, infatti, si adatta a tutti i giocatori, dai principianti agli esperti.

“Il formato stampabile e ritagliabile permette a ciascuno di costruirsi il suo set di carte, segnalini e tavola da gioco e di immergersi nell’Inferno e nel mondo di Dante.”   —Milano University Press website

The game—created by Guglielmo Barucci, Paolo Borsa, Rossana Guglielmetti, Luca Sacchi, and Roberto Tagliani—is available for download here (online since December 2021; last accessed January 9, 2022).

Contributed by Osvaldo Varieschi (MA, Florida State University ’23)

 

Inferno Exhibition at Lisbon, Portugal (2021)

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“As a part of the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), this exhibition will present two drawings on parchment by Sandro Botticelli referring to the Divine Comedy’s Inferno, alongside two manuscripts by Jacopo della Lana and Boccaccio, courtesy of the Vatican Library.

“The exhibition will also feature a copy of Dante’s manuscript which once belonged to Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, currently property of the Portuguese National Library, works from the Calouste Gulbenkian’s collection and works by Rui Chafes which refer to Dante’s Inferno.”    —Visit Lisboa

The 2021 exhibition was hosted by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. See their website here.

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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